Not Just Through The Eyes: Squid 'Sight' Offers Insight Into Treating Human Eye Diseases

It's hard to miss the huge eye of a squid. But now it appears that certain squids can detect light through an organ other than their eyes as wellThat's what researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report in the June 2 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study shows that the light-emitting organ some squids use to camouflage themselves to avoid being seen by predators — usually fish sitting on the ocean floor — also detects light.

The findings may lead to future studies that provide insight into the mechanisms of controlling and perceiving light.

"Evolution has a 'toolkit' and when it needs to do a particular job, such as see light, it uses the same toolkit again and again," explains lead author Margaret McFall-Ngai, a professor of medical microbiology and immunology at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH). "In this case, the light organ, which comes from different tissues than the eye during development, uses the same proteins as the eye to see light."

In studying the squid for the past 20 years, McFall-Ngai and her colleagues have been drawn to the fact that the squid-light organ is a natural model of symbiosis — an interdependent relationship between two different species in which each benefits from the other.

Four decades ago, in 1972, the Koobi Fora Research Project discovered the enigmatic fossilized skull known as KNM-ER 1470 which ignited a now long-standing debate about how many different species of early Homos existed.

One day in May of 2011, Shaun Winterton was looking at pictures of bugs on the Internet when something unusual caught his eye. It was a close shot of a green lacewing — an insect he knew well — but on its wing was an unfamiliar network of black lines and a few flecks of blue.

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